Brother David Steindl-Rast
Brother David Steindl-Rast was born in Vienna in 1926, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in anthropology and psychology. He joined the Mount Savior Monastery in Elmira, New York, in 1953, and was a postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. In 1967, after 12 years of theological training, and with Vatican approval, he began participating in Buddhist-Christian dialogue, studying with Yasutani Roshi, Soen Roshi, and Suzuki Roshi; he later co-authored The Ground We Share: Buddhist and Christian Practice (1994) with Aitken Roshi, and wrote several other books. In 1969, he co-founded the Center for Spiritual Studies, with Hindu, Sufi, Jewish, and Buddhist teachers, for which he received the Martin Buber Award in 1975. In the 1970s, together with Thomas Merton, he provided a renewal of religious orders through the House of Prayer movement, affecting 200,000 members of communities in the U.S. and Canada. He currently runs the online community Network of Grateful Living, does lecture tours, and lives as a hermit.
